NEITHER RHYME NOR REASON. "WRITTEN WITH A PEN OF IRON, WITH THE POINT OF A DIAMOND . . . A wonderful and horrible thing is committed in the land; the pundits prophecy falsely ('an appalling and stunning thing') . . What will you do in the end thereof?" – Jeremiah (700 BC)

"In the beginning, the world was so made that certain signs come before certain events." – Cicero (43 BC)

"But what is Freedom? Rightly understood, a universal license to be good." – Coleridge (1840)

"[The masses] fall more easily for a big lie than to a little one." – Hitler (1925)

"A Communist is a Socialist in a violent hurry." – Gough (1926)

Regular readers may notice that some of those quotes are repetitious, but this was on purpose. As for my comments on the Alexandria shooting, the shooter wrote most of them himself. I was tempted to say that he was a typical Sanders supporter feeling the Bern, but I didn't do it. It would be factual to say that Bernie is a Socialist, but I guess the shooter was a Communist in a hurry.

If that guy thought he were to go down in history as a hero, sadly, he was badly mistaken. Social media is creating a lust for "fame" – if not a blood-lust for freebies. People will do anything to get on TV, but that guy was a cross between John Wilkes Booth and John Brown, both of whom harmed their own "causes"; he was an Occupy Wall Street and Occupy DC nut. But those paid protesters do not speak for the ninety and nine. The first word in "demonstrator" is demon, and it fits! The devil did make him do it.

For a bit of context, let's go back to the fifties. Back before those infamous sixties, there was a bit of overlap between the two parties. Conservatives weren't thrilled about Camelot, but we knew that JFK was at least on America's side! Charlton Heston and many other Republicans were supporters of Dr. MLK, Jr. – only to be called, later, "HATERS."

In the 50s, the Right side said "Resist change," but we didn't say that every idea of the 30s was necessarily "evil." The black family was largely intact yet, but then came the Great Society and the rest is history. Public schools teach kids what to think but not necessarily how to think, let alone how to read and write.

As for that "change," utopian social engineers hold up socialist governments in Scandinavia as examples that "work," but they only worked fairly well – up to now – because, culturally, most Scandinavians haven't forgotten their Protestant work ethic. America is slowly but surely losing that ethic along with most of the rest of our mores.

So along come paid protesters calling for "Soak the one percent and everything will be hunky-dory." Tell that to the Venezualans and the survivors back in the ol' USSR. Funniest headline I've seen today: "In overturning Obama's historic reforms, Trump threatens Cuba's stunning economic success." HUH? That one was from Yay-hoo News.

Anyway, my grandpa Dahlgren rented a large farm and he peddled milk in town. He used to say, "Thank God for the rich people. The poor people don't have any money." He meant that he gave away a lot of milk to the poor who didn't pay their bills, but broke even because the rich always did.

In the early 1900s, families took care of their own weaker links, and we didn't have 90 million people not working. We do now, and employers can't find people to fill millions of jobs. People are so well "taken care of" that they either won't move where the jobs are, or won't take the available training. Some enjoy sitting on their butt smoking dope a bit too much (during the 1981 recession, I moved to Wyoming to keep working without interruption). Anyway, we aren't doing people any favors giving them excessive "favors." I saw a good quote on the back of a T-shirt today:

"To win without risk is to triumph without glory."

Free Enterprise requires more faith than the welfare state, and our FAITH is faltering! The college campus teaches "diversity," which really means anti-assimilation but a homogenized Group Think. Diversity comes from the same family of words that gave us "divorce." Thus the "two Americas," eh? The Alexandria shooter was an embarrassment to the Heartland. I hope his name will be forgotten, but his act will go down in history as just plain stupid.

P.S. Someone said that optimism is going after Moby Dick in a rowboat; chutzpah is taking the tartar sauce along with you. The chipmunks are going after President Trump with fictions made up out of whole cloth, which is an insult to whole cloth. The cannibals are preparing the "tartar" sauce for the celebration that eluded them last November (the Alexandria shooting was on Flag Day, the Donald's birthday). One quotation more:

"With all the stuff that the alt-left got away with in the last few years, it takes an awful lot of chutzpah to accuse Trump ofanything!" – R.U. Kiddingme

PPS: Everything has been turned so upside down by the Lefties that boys are now smokin' in the girls' room (pot okay; tobacco nay).

Curtis Dahlgren

Curtis Dahlgren is semi-retired in southern Wisconsin, and is the author of "Massey-Harris 101." His career has had some rough similarities to one of his favorite writers, Ferrar Fenton... (more)

Curtis Dahlgren is semi-retired in southern Wisconsin, and is the author of "Massey-Harris 101." His career has had some rough similarities to one of his favorite writers, Ferrar Fenton. In the intro to The Fenton Bible, Fenton said:

"I was in '53 a young student in a course of education for an entirely literary career, but with a wider basis of study than is usual. . . . In commerce my life has been passed. . . . Indeed, I hold my commercial experience to have been my most important field of education, divinely prepared to fit me to be a competent translator of the Bible, for it taught me what men are and upon what motives they act, and by what influences they are controlled. Had I, on the other hand, lived the life of a Collegiate Professor, shut up in the narrow walls of a library, I consider that I should have had my knowledge of mankind so confined to glancing through a 'peep-hole' as to make me totally unfit for [my life's work]."

In 1971-72 Curtis did some writing for the Badger Herald and he is listed as a University of Wisconsin-Madison "alumnus" (loosely speaking, along with a few other drop-outs including John Muir, Charles Lindbergh, Frank Lloyd Wright and Dick Cheney). [He writes humor, too.]